End of the world

This video from The Thinking Atheist sums up my feeling on the imaginary end of the world on May 21 better than I could, and I’d be a whole lot more mocking and condescending if I tried. I’ve never been particularly tolerant of fanatical religious belief, and I always used to think that rightwingers’ obsession with what I consider to be the nonsense of the “end of days” was laughably funny. I’m not laughing as much anymore.

I stopped laughing when the believers in “end times” moved into positions of power. The rightwing obsession with Israel has everything to do with rightwing Christians’ belief that they must support Israel in order to bring about the “Armageddon” (another thing I don’t believe in) and “end of days”. Focusing your energies and political policies on bringing about on the end of the world is really pretty sick, in my opinion.

I’m sure that this attitude is to be expected from someone like me—politically liberal and completely secular and un-religious. But, to be fair, I don’t buy into superstitions in general, like the Mayan calendar thing or Nostradamus. Let’s just say I’m a secularist and sceptic and leave it at that for now.

While I find the current fad for believing the world will end May 21 to be hilarious, I also find it sad that people would actually believe it. Still, people have the right to believe whatever they want to—but they don’t have the right to expect anyone else to believe the same, and they also don’t have a right to expect me or anyone else to take them or their beliefs seriously.

Maybe the larger issues here are something I should expand on more. I think I’ll schedule that now: For May 22, 2011.